I have been reading David French’s new book, Divided We Fall, this week and he quotes John Adams speaking to the officers of the Massachusetts Militia in 1798.
While our Country remains untainted with the Principles and manners, which are now producing desolation in so many Parts of the World: while she continues Sincere and incapable of insidious and impious Policy: We shall have the Strongest Reason to rejoice in the local destination assigned Us by Providence. But should the People of America, once become capable of that deep simulation (hypocrisy) towards one another and towards foreign nations, which assumes the Language of Justice and moderation while it is practicing Iniquity and Extravagance; and displays in the most captivating manner the charming Pictures of Candour frankness & sincerity while it is rioting in rapine and Insolence: this Country will be the most miserable Habitation in the World. Because We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Gallantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
While we were not included in Isaiah’s list of nations to be judged for pride, there is much to think about from this quote from one of our Founding Fathers. What happens to a nation that assumes the language of justice and moderation while it is practicing iniquity and extravagance? What happens to a nation that begins with so much promise but ends with corruption that is no longer capable of being governed by morality and religion? It’s worth repeating. “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Adams and Isaiah are saying the same thing when Adams describes such a place as “the most miserable habitation in the world” and Isaiah writes of God’s judgment on the world in Chapter 24. Let’s just read some of the phrases:
3 The earth will be completely laid waste
and totally plundered.
4 The earth dries up and withers,
the world languishes and withers,
the heavens languish with the earth.
5 The earth is defiled by its people;
they have disobeyed the laws,
violated the statutes
and broken the everlasting covenant.
6 Therefore a curse consumes the earth;
its people must bear their guilt.
Therefore earth’s inhabitants are burned up,
and very few are left.
10 The ruined city lies desolate;
the entrance to every house is barred.
12 The city is left in ruins,
its gate is battered to pieces.
The floodgates of the heavens are opened,
the foundations of the earth shake.
19 The earth is broken up,
the earth is split asunder,
the earth is violently shaken.
20 The earth reels like a drunkard,
it sways like a hut in the wind;
so heavy upon it is the guilt of its rebellion
that it falls—never to rise again.
This is God’s judgment on the whole earth and not just a few nations. Not only flood but fire. The earth tilts off balance and sways back and forth. It will be a horrible place of ruined cities and desolation because the people have broken their covenants and disobeyed the laws and, as a result, the earth is cursed and the people must bear their guilt. The people sin and the earth suffers. It will be, as Adams said, “the most miserable habitation in the whole world” – except it will describe the entire world and not one country.
But then, suddenly as the world is desolate and consumed by a curse, Isaiah snaps us around and begins Chapter 25 with:
Lord, you are my God;
I will exalt you and praise your name,
for in perfect faithfulness
you have done wonderful things,
things planned long ago.
4 You have been a refuge for the poor,
a refuge for the needy in their distress,
a shelter from the storm
and a shade from the heat.
6 On this mountain the Lord Almighty will prepare
a feast of rich food for all peoples,
a banquet of aged wine—
the best of meats and the finest of wines.
7 On this mountain he will destroy
the shroud that enfolds all peoples,
the sheet that covers all nations;
8 he will swallow up death forever.
The Sovereign Lord will wipe away the tears
from all faces;
he will remove his people’s disgrace
from all the earth.
The Lord has spoken.
9 In that day they will say,
“Surely this is our God;
we trusted in him, and he saved us.
This is the Lord, we trusted in him;
let us rejoice and be glad in his salvation.”
The world once cursed and desolate will be the place of a great Feast. The habitations of the ruthless will be turned into rubble and their breath that was like a storm will be silenced.
The party will begin. The feast will be served and everyone will be seated. The shroud that has covered our eyes from the beginning will be lifted and for the first time we will see. As Paul says in Romans 8:
“I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.
We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies.”
Again, Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13:
“Now we see but a poor reflection; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.”
Later in 1 Corinthians 15 Paul writes:
“For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with the immortal. When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: “Death has been swallowed up in victory.”
“Where, O death, is your victory?
“Where, O death, is your sting?”
Do you see how deeply embedded this passage was in the mind of Paul as he wrote? Do you see how consistent the image of a Feast that follows desolation runs throughout Scripture? Do you see how woven together are these themes with resurrected lives that enjoy the presence of the Lord – and we are not ghostly figures floating around an uninhabited and vacant eternity. We are mortal clothed with immortality. We are perishable clothed with imperishability. We will one day be as Christ was when he returned from death. He had a body. He walked. He ate. He was physically present and not simply a hologram or a powerful presence in their imagination.
Today, we sometimes are tempted to wish for the sweet bye and bye in the midst of all the turmoil we are experiencing. Or, we may even give up our hope for the Feast that is coming after the desolation and say to ourselves our only hope is to somehow make this world a better place and then die.
That is not the Gospel. The Gospel is we are fully in this world and one day we will become resurrected and eternal creatures just as Christ is today.
Why is the resurrection so important? Why can we not be satisfied with a great moral religion? Why not just focus on the teachings of Jesus? Paul says it best in 1 Corinthians 15: “For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile…If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.” Christianity without the resurrection is simply another ethic competing for attention and adherence and nothing more than that.
I know we need to make room for all religions in a pluralistic society. I would not want to live in any other kind. However, I have to remember that faith without a resurrection is futile. It does not mean it is bad – only a dead end. It does not mean it is evil – only a pitiful substitute for Christ. There is nothing in it that dazzles or surprises. Yes, it is the best we can do and, yes, sometimes it calls out of us the best we can be on our own but that is not what it means to live a life of the Spirit.
As well, we have to be careful that we do not make our faith in Christ so practical and focused on being a way to make this life better that we lose the one thing that makes it real. Our faith in Christ is not simply a way to improve this life. In fact, we do not have any reason to believe it will. The problem is we put off thinking about a resurrected life after death in order to improve our lives in the here and now. I know it is hard – almost more than we can do. Eric Hoffer said “It is hope around the corner brand of hope that prompts people to action, while the distant hope only acts as an opiate.”
We want that around the corner kind of hope and the resurrected life is so unknowable. We want the world to change for us. Anne Lamott says,”I think they are tired of me saying around Easter that the crucifixion looked like a big win for the Romans. The following Monday, Caesar and Herod were still in power. The chief priests were still the chief priests. (And meanwhile, in a tucked-away corner, the 12 were transformed. And some women, too.)”
It still feels like a big win for the Romans sometimes.
We have so many stories from Jesus about the Kingdom of God but do you ever wish he would have told a few about what the resurrected life is like – just to give us a hint about what we are waiting for? But, it would have been like telling the seed what a tree will be like. That is why we need stories, metaphors and poems. That is why, in the end, we have to trust.
But it is our paying attention to the fact of the resurrection that allows us to live in the here and now with purpose. You know the C.S. Lewis quote. “If you read history, you will find that the Christians who did the most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next. He said, “Aim at heaven and you get earth thrown in; aim at earth and you get neither.”
Paul says in 2 Corinthians 4:18, “So we fix our eyes not on what is seen but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” That doesn’t mean Paul saw life as an illusion or as unimportant. It does not mean his suffering had made him think only about heaven. I think it is more like he fixed his eyes on the not yet seen that was more real than anything we can imagine.
Think of standing at a train station looking down the track. You are waiting for something that is real. It is not delusional or denial or hoping something will happen. You believe in the not yet seen. That is how I try to think about the life of the resurrection. I believe in the not yet seen. I am preparing for that yet unseen train to arrive.
And while we wait the Spirit of God is gradually but relentlessly recreating us from the inside and making us ready for what is next. We know that the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in us, and he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to our mortal bodies through his Spirit, who lives in us.
We will live different lives not just later but now. We live in that in between time – the tension between the seen and yet to be seen. We are not afraid of death or disinterested in life. We are confident that the one who began a good work in us will carry it to completion until the day of Christ Jesus. We know that this life and this body is just a seed that has been planted and unless it dies it will not become filled with the splendor God intends for us. “So it will be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power.”
Frederick Buechner said this: “The worst isn’t the last thing about the world. It’s the next to last thing. The last thing is the best…All is well.” That is our faith in these times that seem so hopeless and dark. It is not the worst. It is not the last. If we fix our eyes only on what is seen we will lose heart but we don’t. We fix our eyes on what has yet to be seen but will be. Jesus is still about his Father’s business. He has gone on ahead of us and that train will come right on time to take us where he is already waiting to welcome us.
So many people, including theologians, have made the Resurrection into a metaphor or a symbol of what life in the here and now can be like. Or, they turn it into an image of the annual renewal of Spring. Resurrection is not renewal. It is not a metaphor for a new life and a new beginning. It is literal, physical and without it, as Updike says, “the Church will fall.”
Seven Stanzas At Easter
John Updike
Make no mistake: if he rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,
The amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall.
It was not as the flowers,
Each soft spring recurrent;
It was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the
Eleven apostles;
It was as His flesh; ours.
The same hinged thumbs and toes
The same valved heart
That—pierced—died, withered, paused, and then regathered
Out of enduring Might
New strength to enclose.
Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
Credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door.
The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
Not a stone in a story,
But the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of
Time will eclipse for each of us
The wide light of day.
And if we have an angel at the tomb,
Make it a real angel,
Weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in
The dawn light, robed in real linen
Spun on a definite loom.
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
For our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
Lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed
By the miracle,
And crushed by remonstrance.
We can live through anything knowing God in perfect faithfulness has done and will do marvelous things. Especially now, when it is so easy to focus on the immediate – Election Day, the end of the pandemic – we need to fix our eyes on a longer horizon and live more each day in the light of the coming glory.
The Constitution without a moral and religious people is inadequate. The Church without a resurrection is an imposter.